Now, thanks in part to that same committee, the federal government has quietly axed any attempt to regulate gun shows.

As The Canadian Press reports, Ottawa’s decision to repeal regulations meant to ensure the safety and security of weapons at gun shows has caused some alarm.

The 1998 regulations had never been put into force, in part because the now-defunct long gun registry — which set up a paper trail for the buyers and sellers of rifles — made them moot.

But with the registry dismantled, the gun show regulations suddenly became relevant. Then they were killed.

Ontario Chief Firearms Officer Chris Wyatt told The Canadian Press that gun shows are now in danger of becoming centres for the sale of illegal and stolen firearms — as they are in the U.S.

Ironically, Canada’s move comes as the U.S. government — in the wake of the Newtown elementary school massacre — contemplates stiffer rules for its gun shows.

For Harper, all of this is dangerous political territory.

His Conservatives successfully used gun control as a weapon against the Liberals.

But in doing so, they helped to build up the credibility of ardent gun lobbyists previously dismissed as kooks.

In 1978, few politicians paid much attention to Canada’s National Firearms Association, for instance, when it came out against restrictions on assault weapons.

Modelled on America’s National Rifle Association, the NFA argued then that such restrictions were only the first step in a calculated plot to disarm the Canadian public.

Even Conservatives chuckled at that.

Not that gun control laws were ever easy. It took Brian Mulroney’s Tory government two tries to get stiffer gun laws through Parliament in the wake of the 1989 Montreal massacre of 14 women.

Still, the political conversation remained relatively calm — until 1995 when a new Liberal government brought in the long-gun registry.

The Liberal move was designed in part to create a wedge issue that would discomfit the opposition Reform Party in urban Canada. And, at the outset of the debate, it seemed the strategy might work.

Certainly, Harper was careful. Then a Reform MP, he broke ranks with his party to vote with the Liberals for the gun registry.

He claimed at the time that he was following the wishes of his Calgary West constituents. But, as he would explain later and in a different context, he was also uncomfortable with emotional, populist issues.

A party that wanted to govern, he liked to say, couldn’t waste its time on marginal groups.

What Harper soon discovered, however, was that opposition to the long-gun registry was anything but marginal — in the West, in the North, in rural Ontario, even in the Maritimes.

Gun lobbies supported his Conservatives. His Conservatives, in turn, pandered to the gun lobbies.

But in that pandering, they forgot that Canada is not the U.S. Canadians may object to registering their hunting rifles. But that doesn’t mean they think they have a God-given right to pack their basements with Uzis.

The gun lobbies who advise government, however, do think that.

“The price of our freedom is unceasing vigilance,” declared one recent editorial in the NFA’s official magazine. It warned that “fifth-columnists” inside the federal bureaucracy — in alliance with the United Nations — were plotting to keep alive the Liberals’ insidious “social engineering experiment.”

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